Clarence Darrow Quotes

Liberty is the most jealous and exacting mistress that can beguile the brain and soul of man. She will have nothing from him who will not give her all. She knows that his pretended love serves but to betray. But when once the fierce heat of her quenchless, lustrous eyes have burned into the victim's heart, he will know no other smile but hers.

The really intelligent are as abnormal as the defective. The great masses of men are rather mediocre, and those above and below are exceptions.

The purpose of life is to live it.

The ability and inclination to use physical strength is no indication of bravery or tenacity to life. The greatest cowards are often the greatest bullies. Nothing is cheaper and more common than physical bravery.

Whenever I hear people discussing birth control, I always remember that I was fifth.

If there is to be any permanent improvement in man and any better social order, it must come mainly from the education and humanizing of man.

In order to have enough freedom, it is necessary to have too much.

My constitution was destroyed long ago; now I am living under the bylaws.

No iconoclast can possibly escape the severest criticism.

If a man is happy in America, it is considered he is doing something wrong.

It is just as often a great misfortune to be the child of the rich as it is to be the child of the poor. Wealth has its misfortunes. Too much, too great opportunity and advantage given to a child has its misfortunes.

Men have always been obliged to fight to preserve liberty. Constitutions and laws do not safeguard liberty. It can be preserved only by a tolerant people, and this means eternal conflict.

To be an effective criminal defense counsel, an attorney must be prepared to be demanding, outrageous, irreverent, blasphemous, a rogue, a renegade, and a hated, isolated, and lonely person - few love a spokesman for the despised and the damned.

The truth is, no man is white and no man is black. We are all freckled.

Laws should be like clothes. They should be made to fit the people they are meant to serve.

Chase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coat tails.

Education was in danger from the source that always hampered it—religious fanaticism.

Most jury trials are contests between the rich and poor.

Religious doctrines do not and clearly cannot be adopted as the criminal code of a state.

Common experience shows how much rarer is moral courage than physical bravery. A thousand men will march to the mouth of the cannon where one man will dare espouse an unpopular cause . . . True courage and manhood come from the consciousness of the right attitude toward the world, the faith in one's purpose, and the sufficiency of one's own approval as a justification for one's own acts.

It must always be remembered that all laws are naturally and inevitably evolved by the strongest force in a community, and in the last analysis made for the protection of the dominant class.

We're all killers at heart . . . . I have never taken anybody's life, but I have often read obituary notices with considerable satisfaction.

The purpose of man is like the purpose of a pollywog - to wiggle along as far as he can without dying; or, to hang to life until death takes him.

In the great flood of human life that is spawned upon the earth, it is not often that a man is born.

The truth is that brains have little to do with either the making or accumulating of money.

History repeats itself. That's one of the things wrong with history.

Sympathy is the child of imagination

People in this world are not often logical.

An agnostic is a doubter. The word is generally applied to those who doubt the verity of accepted religious creeds of faiths.

I had grown tired of standing in the lean and lonely front line facing the greatest enemy that ever confronted man -- public opinion.

We know life is futile. A man who considers that his life is of very wonderful importance is awfully close to a padded cell.

Each child should be more intelligent than his parents.

All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike someone they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.

The law is a horrible business.

In spite of all the yearnings of men, no one can produce a single fact or reason to support the belief in God and in personal immortality.

Never forget, almost every case has been won or lost when the jury is sworn.

Do I need to argue to Your Honor that cruelty only breeds cruelty? That hatred only causes hatred; that if there is any way to soften this human heart which is hard enough at its best, if there is any way to kill evil and hatred and all that goes with it, it is not through evil and hatred and cruelty; it is through charity, and love, and understanding?

Autobiography is never entirely true. No one can get the right perspective on himself. Every fact is colored by imagination and dream.

The audience that storms the box-office of the theater to gain entrance to a sensational show is small and sleepy compared with the throng that crashes the courthouse door when something concerning real life and death is to be laid bare to the public.

An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral.

Every instinct that is found in any man is in all men. The strength of the emotion may not be so overpowering, the barriers against possession not so insurmountable, the urge to accomplish the desire less keen. With some, inhibitions and urges may be neutralized by other tendencies. But with every being the primal emotions are there. All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike some one they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.

Liberty is the most jealous and exacting mistress that can beguile the brain and soul of man.

I am sure of very little, and I shouldn't be surprised if those things were wrong.

Hoover, if elected, will do one thing that is almost incomprehensible to the human mind: he will make a great man out of Coolidge.

The truth is always modern and there never comes a time when it is safe to give it voice.

A prison is confining to the body, but whether it affects the mind, depends entirely upon the mind.